Countdown to Final Crisis #5Review

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Great Disaster? Try Great Failure...

By Dan Phillips

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For all you comic book writers out there, of both the aspiring and professional varieties, I seriously hope the last two issues of Countdown to Final Crisis will teach you all you need to know (and I assume you pros already know this much) about how to ruin a climax of a story.

In what can only be described as the last great miscalculation in a overall horribly misconceived story, the creators behind DC's current weekly decided to "ramp up" the excitement of their story's big pay off – the "Great" Disaster – by narrating it with detached, past-tense voice-over captions from the voice (or diary) of a very minor character. It's mind-boggling really, as if the brain trust behind this utter failure of a series actually decided to consciously rob this ongoing tale of what little immediacy it had left.

And you want to know the real kicker? Adam Beechen's painfully over-wrought narration (as told by another Earth's Buddy Blank) isn't even the worse part of the issue. That dishonorable distinction goes to the actual nature of the not-so-great disaster in question, which sees humans and superheroes morph into animals while rats, dogs and other rabid animals grab kitchen knifes and attack the few uninfected characters left running around the streets of this unknown parallel Earth.

Laughably ridiculous doesn't even begin to describe some of these visuals. A Superman with a dog's head battling Wonder Woman over Metropolis. Triplicate Girl battling for her life against a butcher-knife-wielding bulldog. I'm not making this stuff up, folks. It's all there in this issue, and it's all likely to make you laugh out loud for all the wrong reasons. That is, of course, until you read the narration that accompanies such images, which tries with all its might to make you take these events seriously. When taken together as a sum of its parts, this issue is far more likely to make you feel sorry for those involved (particularly Jim Starlin, whose art is far too high in quality to accompany such a script), and for yourself for having followed this series for almost a full year.

And for what? What was the purpose of all this idiocy? From the looks of it, the entire Great Disaster, the entire Karate Kid/Triplicate Girl storyline and the better part of Countdown's entire "plot" was all geared towards setting up a new version of a Jack Kirby title that first introduced the idea of a Great Disaster three decades ago. A series that takes place on a parallel Earth that will likely have little or no effect on or interplay with the greater DCU besides a few glorified panels in the upcoming Final Crisis. If you're sensing that this whole business makes me angry, then you're right. I am angry. Angry that I was forced to stick with this series for this long only to be rewarded in this manner.

For all the lessons that 52 taught us about how to do a weekly series and tell a 52-part serial the right way, it seems like Countdown has done the opposite – underlining those very lessons by showing us what happens when you go about things the wrong way. I can only hope that DC, Kurt Busiek and any other bold and/or foolish creator that tries to take on such a task will learn from this Great Disaster of a series.